Daily Search Forum Recap: September 17, 2009

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Yahoo Site Explorer Adds Top Queries Report
I was looking at Yahoo Site Explorer when I was reviewing the dynamic URL tool earlier and noticed a new beta link available to sites that are validated or authenticated in Site Explorer. The new tool is named "Top Queries" and it basically shows you the top ten searches you come up for a specific day, week or month. It shows the number of views and clicks you received for those top queries. In addition,

Google Adds Parameter Handling To Webmaster Tools, Plays Catchup to Yahoo Site Explorer
If you login to Google Webmaster Tools, click on site configuration, then on settings, you will see a new option for "parameter handling." Here is a screen capture: This basically allows you to tell Google which parameters in the URL they should ignore. This comes in handy for tracking parameters added to the URL, or duplicate content caused by printer friendly URLs and many other cases. If you want to learn more about how this

Google Says Pages That Validate Do Not Get Ranking Boost
The question of having valid HTML and would it help your rankings in Google or other search engines is not new. Most SEOs believed that it made no impact on your rankings, unless Googlebot has serious issues crawling your site. In a recent YouTube video, Google's Matt Cutts explained why Google.com does not validate (historically has not) and also added that Google doesn't "give any sort of boost to web pages that validate." He explained

Bing Masking MSNBot Under Mozilla's UserAgent & Reverse IP Fails
With all the on going issues with MSNBot not behaving, I am not too surprised to see more complaints about the little spider. New confirmed reports from Bing Forums shows that MSNBot is hiding itself under the UserAgent of Mozilla/4.0. How does this person know that it is MSNBot? Two reason, it is "crawler-acting-like" and also because it is in the same range of IP adresses as MSNBot. Brett Yount from the Microsoft Bing team

Google Showing Weird Title for Wikipedia Article
Sometimes I like to point out weird anomalies in the Google search results. A search for [lufthansa fleet] returns a Wikipedia listing to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa. The issue is, the way Google lists out the snippet and title is all weird: Why does it show it like that? What does wxloop mm5aq_stata_pm25gt65 2008112700///1 mean? Why no snippet? JohnMu from Google said it isn't visible everyone, but it is just one of those strange anomalies. He said: Thanks

Google Acquires reCAPTCHA, SEOs Drop reCAPTCHA
Google acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that has an open based CAPTCHA technology for validating humans as being real humans. Google basically wants them to help improve their book and newspaper scanning OCR technology. reCAPTCHA uses newspaper words as the identifier for human detection. reCAPTCHA collects all of the responses from humans when they are asked to enter in what they see as the words. This data is incredibly valuable to companies that want to better

Google AdSense Locks Down Publisher Accounts For Manual Review
There are many threads, plus one really long one at Google AdSense Help forums with publishers complaining they cannot login to the AdSense portal. I tried it myself and I have no problem, but it seems like the typical person complaining are those new to AdSense. Most seem to be related to Google taking down the account for a manual "review." The issue is, Google said that the review would only take about a week.